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The Strike explores the idea of love in a Tamil family. Love here operates in the context of kinship ties and cultural symbols and is as much a learned experience as it is considered to be an innate expression in the West.
The novel follows Hari, a twelve year old Brahmin boy, in 1980s India as he tries to negotiate the religious, linguistic, class and sexual politics of the adult world around him. His experiment in eating a fish leads to the accidental death of his paternal grandmother; his preference for Hindi, the national language, over his mother tongue Tamil leads to slanderous graffiti against his family in Madras and his friendship with the family maid, Sivagami, lands him in trouble with Vishu, a young Tamil film fan, crook and a minor political functionary.
Matters come to a head when M.G.R., a film star turned politician dies and his supporters lead by Vishu declare a strike, trapping Hari and his mother on a train. Hari uses the train ride and the strike to befriend the handsome Mukund, a young man travelling to Madras to become a film hero and the hijra Radha, a eunuch, and through them learn about forbidden sexualities. Later, with some help from his uncle, Hari manages to fulfill his childhood wish of riding an engine with disastrous consequences. His engine ride and the resulting confrontation with the strikers allows Hari to learn how the interactions among individuals shaped through kinship ties and rigid hierarchies of class are collapsing in modern India.
To know more about this novel as well as get information regarding publicity tours, readings and other information, please visit www.thestrike.ca
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